Theaters give anchor to life in Great Plains towns

In an age of streaming online video and massive multiplexes, one-screen movie theaters might seem to be a thing of the past, but across the Great Plains they are making a comeback, Patricia Leigh Brown of The New York Times reports. "The small-town, Main Street movie theater is thriving in North Dakota, the result of a grass-roots movement to keep storefront movie houses, with their jewel-like marquees and facades of careworn utility, at the center of community life. The revival is not confined to North Dakota; Main Street movie houses like the Alamo in Bucksport, Me., the Luna in Clayton, N.M., and the Strand in Old Forge, N.Y., are flourishing as well." (NYT photo of theater in Langdon, N.D., by Fred R. Conrad)

"If we were in Los Angeles or Phoenix, the only reason to go to a movie would be to see it," Cecile Wehrman, a newspaper editor who, with members of the nonprofit Meadowlark Arts Council resuscitated the Dakota in Crosby, N.D., told Brown. "But in a small town, the theater is like a neighborhood. It’s the see-and-be-seen, bring everyone and sit together kind of place." Brown writes, "In the Great Plains, where stop signs can be 50 miles apart and the nearest multiplex is 200 miles round trip, the town theater — one screen, one show a night, weekends only — is an anchoring force, especially for families."

Tim Kennedy, landscape-architecture professor who has traveled to small theaters across North Dakota for a book, says "The communal will of rural towns that keep theaters going represents 'buildings as social capital,' forged 'outside the franchise cinemas and their ubiquitous presence at the malls,'" Brown writes. Some point to baby boomers as the source of the revitalization. "They are the last picture-show generation on the plains," Tom Isern, a professor of history at North Dakota State University Fargo, told Brown, "who can remember that movie theater experience and want to transmit that to their kids." (Read more)